"I know it's not easy to meet someone nice.
Everybody wants to but no one seems good enough for anyone - and the less willing you are to compromise, the more alone you find yourself."
All Gigi wants from life is to get through her work day with...
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Alright.
So I'm standing there - behind Derin who is basically radiating hostility -
I am gaping at Etomi who is standing behind Akudo - who is low key glowing for Africa.
I'm wondering if Akudo is completely alright in the head.
Not only is she 100 years late for the dinner her husband slaved over - let's face it - for her... when she finally appears she's not alone. Nope. She is in the company of the one person her husband can actually not be paranoid enough about.
Bruh...
This is none of my business, I'm thinking. I shouldn't even be here right now. It's late, I have work tomorrow and I don't really want this high definition third person POV of Akudo and Derin's marriage. Especially since Akudo is my primary friendship here.
I should've left but the thing was, Akudo was not the only one electrified by Etomi's presence.
I peeked over Derin's shoulder at him. Since stepping inside he'd only looked at me once and his gaze had been polite and brief. His attention was now on Derin who was wearing the expression of a Club Bouncer pre - bouncing. Did he know about Etomi, I wondered glancing at my excited friend again.
Maybe I should explain all this - why Derin should have been worried, why I suddenly couldn't leave - why this situation had MESS stamped all over it.
Bear with me as I digress into this gist ...
***
It all goes back to Secondary School, Day 0 of JSS1.
Because of the lack of F surnames in my class, I, being a Folorunso, had my dreams of attaining cooldom by strategic classroom placement abruptly shattered when I found myself seated behind a short, bespectacled boy whose last name was, the unfathomable to me then, Eyakodevu.
Luckily, back then I wasn't the sort to angst - even after it turned out that he did not wear his efiko glasses in vain. When I discovered that despite his worrying academic ways he liked movies, comics and sci-fi and fantasy TV shows like I did, I became determined to be the Aladdin to his Jasmine and show him a whole new world of slacking off.
Fortunately for him I was never that successful in making him neglect his studies but through it we somehow became best friends. And I mean BEST. As the years passed in Junior Secondary School I made friends that were girls too, from my classes, my dorm rooms, my clubs - but Etomi and I were the thickest. We had stupid code languages, wrote (and never finished) our own comic series together about a feral boy hero who fights monsters (he wrote and I drew) and we came as a package deal when our parents came on visiting day.
No one ever asked if we were dating or anything weird like that. Most likely because back then neither Etomi (small and studious) nor I (a gangly, open mouth laugher) was anyone's idea of a romantic interest. I know we must have looked funny together; him all short and class prefect looking with his glasses and chubby cheeks, me properly heighting him with my perpetually rumpled uniform and flyaway hair bun. Me forever gabbing, him forever listening and laughing.
